If in 15th Century Europe, Calvin's Geneva was
called City of Heretics, in the 21st Century, all cities of Iran and Iranian
communities abroad, can be called cities of heretics. If in 1600, Giordano Bruno
is burnt at the stakes in Rome, today
Salamn Rushdie not even an Iranian, and living outside Iran, was
condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Iranians questioning the
tenets of Islamist theocracy have not had a better fate either. Not just
the dissent within Islamism, but dissent in all other groups, whether religious
or political, is the everyday reality of Iran, despite the harsh response of the
orthodoxies.

It is as if the theocracy of Islamic Republic of
Iran (IRI) has taught the people to reexamine their own principles, regardless
of what political or religious views they adhere to, and thus the growth of
dissent among Iranians of all walks of life, whether within Iran or abroad.
Here is a description of Rome of 1600 at the time of burning of Giordano Bruno,
which reminds one of Iran of 2000, and can explain how any sane individual would
end up questioning all basic tenets of his/her beliefs, when witnessing such
cruelties done in defense of a dogma:

"For Holy Year 1600 more than
three million persons were crowded into Rome. There were parades of
pilgrims, processions of flagellants. The city was in turmoil, as robberies and
murders multiplied., The number 1600, composed of a nine and seven, had
magical meaning: perhaps it signified that the end was near. Prophets
prophesized. In the meantime, the penitents who expected to amass the necessary
absolutions from sin before it was too late were fleeced by the noble Romans.
One of the minor attractions of February 17 was announced in fly sheets.
The Nolan [Giordano Bruno], a most stubborn heretic, was being burned in the
Piazza Santa Fiore. A witness was a German converted to the Catholic
faith, a scholar who never missed a major theological contest, Gaspar Schopp.
He hovered over the final days of Bruno, vulture-like, picking up his last words
and spreading them about. To him we owe the report of Bruno's defiance of
his judges in Santa Maria sopra Minerva: "I daresay you are more afraid to hand
down the sentence against me than I am to receive it." And after the burning,
Schopp dispatched a gloating account to the rector of the University of Altdorf:
"Thus he perished wretchedly by roasting, and he can go tell in those fantastic
worlds he dreamed up how in this world impious blasphemers are dealt with in
Rome." Schopp would reappear in Campanella's cells a decade later and dish out
promises to work for his deliverance, while plagiarizing the manuscripts he
could get hold of". [Frank R. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought
in the Western World, 1979, P. 241]

***

If the reactionary Islamist vision of 1979 Revolution of Iran
was a representation of a return to the past, in response to the crisis of
industrial society, in contrast, today's vision of the world, from the
perspective of pro-democracy movement of Iran, represents the most thorough
endeavor to go beyond the industrial paradigm, to understand the
global events.

If basically the progressive movements in the West have
been
neglecting the atrocities of regimes such as IRI, by focusing only on
the demerits of ultranationalist interventionist political factions of the West, the pro-democracy movement of
Iran, not only has shown the Medieval nature of regimes such IRI, but has also
reminded the West of upholding its own achievements in the areas of human rights
values, democracy, and justice when countering Western ultranationalists, rather
than sacrificing human rights values for the exigencies of doing business in the
undeveloped countries of the world, appeasing Medieval regimes like IRI with the
pretense of fighting colonialism.

Iranian pro-democracy movement has opposed interventionist
currents of the West,
but not like the anti-war groups of the West, which have used the
so-called anti-imperialist anti-American slogans of regimes such as IRI, to
justify their silence about the atrocities of such regimes.
This does not mean that the pro-democracy activists of Iran support
interventionism views of U.S. ultranationalists who want to attack other parts
of the world as a solution to the crisis of old industrial society. But it
does mean that Medievalism of regimes like IRI is as much of a Dark Force in the
world as the ultranationalism of the Western interventionists.

Iranian pro-democracy movement sees the progressive
forces of the West as its ally, but until the time this ally understands the
geopolitical changes and sees that we are not in an era of colonialism, anti-war
forces will continue to miss to come to grips with the new world realities.

They keep on seeing the danger of Western
ultranationalist industrial attack on globalization, which is one side of the coin,
but at the same time they continue to miss seeing, and at times are ally with, pre-industrial attack on globalization
from backward forces of the undeveloped countries, which is the other side of the coin of
reactionary attempts for return to the past, blocking the ushering in of a
post-industrial societies worldwide.

What is it that the West's anti-war movement, in
its vision, has lost sight of, which has ended in missing the atrocities of regimes such as IRI? Why do
the Iranian apologist and
lobbyist groups and individuals living in the West, have been whitewashing the atrocities of IRI,
all these years, under the banner of fighting
foreign aggression and neo-colonialism? Haven't they seen the cold-blooded
slaughter of Bakhtiar or Boroumand in Paris? Haven't they heard of terror
of Ghasemloo and other Kurdish leaders? How about the slaughter of
Forouhars in Iran by IRI information ministry agents? Are all
these errors simple negligence? Haven't they seen books of people like
Steven Emerson about atrocities of Islamists inside the U.S.? The
problem is not ignorance, especially after Sept 11, 2001, the problem is that
the world view of anti-war and peace
movements is an obsolete view, which has ended up in them siding with regimes such as IRIorSaddam.

In response to the views of anti-war groups in
the West siding with fascist regimes of Milosevic and Saddam, some authors like Karl Popper,
in 1993 before his death, emphasized
war on
war in Kant's essay entitled Perpetual Peace, and
thus showed the legitimacy of UN intervention in the Balkans. Moreover there are
those who reject U.S. unilateral action in cases like Iraq, but they support UN
intervention in cases like Afghanistan as legitimate.
Some others condemn even UN intervention in
cases where an undeveloped country has cruelly violated all standards of human rights.
All such options were brilliantly enumerated by Kant in his Perpetual Peace
and they became the theoretical foundations of League of Nations and later the
UN.

The reason all these views are not explaining the issues we are facing
today, is
because we are not living at the time of flourishing of nation-states, when all
these alternatives made sense. We are
living in the era of the death of nation-states as political entities of the
future.

I explained this shift in 1989 in a paper entitled "A
Futurist Viewpoint". I wrote that just as tribes and families lost their
*political* significance in the Modern Times, in the post-industrial era,
the nation-states are increasingly losing their importance in
political life of their citizens. Reviving political rule of religious
communities or families are attempts to return to the past in search for finding an answer to the present
reality of demise of nation-states as political entities.

I should note that the demise
of tribes and families as political entities did not mean the demise of love of one's family.
In the same way, demise of nation-states does not mean the
demise of love for one's nation and, as I have explained in details elsewhere, the
national sentiments will continue to
exist.

But the political importance of nation-states
will diminish, and leader of an international organization like UN can have more impact on
the life of an individual, than the head of state of his/her own country. Thus the need to have a
global alternative for *political* life of the world, beyond the industrial
paradigm of nation-states and their confederacies.

This vision of going beyond nation-states is what
is needed for progressive forces that identify themselves as anti-war or peace
movement, to achieve universal human rights ideals that have been clearly
formulated in this century.

Just as confederacy of tribes and families
could not help, when nation-states were ushering in, the UN or confederacy of
nation-states cannot solve the issues of today's world, and the new values must
create new organizational forms that are beyond nation-states.

From economics to science, new international
organizations have been popping up every day in the international arena and the
new communications media and the Internet have helped this development a lot. Even before the spread of the Internet, at
the time of US-Soviet tensions, Beyond War organization in Palo Alto of
California, which my late friend
Jack Li was a cofounder, was an example of international endeavors to go
beyond the war and peace paradigm of nation-states.

Cultural relativism which is popular
in the current anti-war and peace movements, negates universal human rights ideals that have
started these movements in the first place, and this mindset has been a major
block for the progressive forces in the West, to form new international
alternative to war and peace of industrial world, and has ended up helping
retrogressive forces in the undeveloped countries.

The cultural relativists are
not respecting the progressive views of the undeveloped world, to condemn the
backward forces of those countries alongside condemning of
ultranationalists of the West, and their view of the non-Western world is
very patronizing, when they stop to understand the outcry of progressive forces who are hollering from the City of Heretics about the
onslaught of pluralists by the pre-industrial Medieval forces in those
countries. Forces like Taliban and IRI. They think they know better
by supporting states like IRI and ignoring the reports of killings of heretics,
amputations, eye gouging, and other atrocities.

In fact, the issue is deeper than not
understanding the outcries from the dungeons of Isamic
Republic . It is an industrial vision of anti-war
movement which is holding them back. The progressive forces
of the West can learn from the Iranian cities of heretics, where people are
questioning the basic tenets of the past ideologies of industrial society, in
both its capitalist and socialist versions, when looking at the future.

Just being anti-war does not answer the issues of the present
day world and one can
end up supporting fascists like Saddam Hussein, as it happened with the anti-war
forces, and as it is happening now when basically they are silent about the
atrocities of IRI, and instead of these progressive forces of the West talking of
atrocities of IRI, we see neocons doing more exposition of these Dark Forces.
There are inquisitions, stoning, eye gouging, and amputations in Iran, and it is
legal to murder and kill the heretics in the law of land of IRI, when the
president and parliament of the country have called themselves reformists for
over 4 years.

My goal is not to discard the progressive
movement in the West. On the contrary, I see the anti-war and peace movements
as potential allies of Iranian pro-democracy movement, but not with their
current obsolete
vision of the world that they have, which they carry from the era of
colonialism, not realizing that what their view describes is a world long passed.
Globalization has its own issues but definitely they are not the same
issues of colonialism.

The post-industrial vision strives to end the
state of majority of human beings living as intelligent tools for millennia and tries to plan economic and
social life of the future around the new possibilities of AI and
nanotechnology, rather than the opposite, which is prolonging the
tool-like life of human beings, to accommodate the obsolete economic, social,
and political
views of human beings.

We have already spent three decades of intensive
post-industrial development in some parts of the world yet the work week is still unchanged.
True that some professions may even end up to have more work than the past
workweek would assume, but the society at large should have come down to less than
30 hours a week of work in the developed countries by now. I have discussed
the issue of
social justice in the post-industrial world elsewhere which is completely
different from the industrial age, and issues of taxation and welfare need to be
restructured accordingly, based on these new realities..

The commitment to a world beyond the industrial
society of the past, gets its primary opposition in the West, from the
industrial forces, that are the foundation of ultranationalist political forces
of the West, but in the undeveloped countries, the main opposition to
post-industrial development, is coming
from the pre-industrial forces, because of the weakness of industrial
development in those countries. This is why these retrogressive movements
in the undeveloped world have religious and ideological flavor more than what
one would find in the developed countries.

Therefore the ultranationalists of the U.S. find
their best allies among the Medieval forces of Islamism and Monarchy in the
Middle East, from Taliban and IRI to Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as I have
explained extensively in April 2002, in my paper entitled "Iran
& Saudi Arabia: Monarchies & Islamism".

The progressive forces of the West should oppose
the retrogressive alliance of the political forces of the past, which is aimed at
blocking the future post-industrial global development. Supporting
the pre-industrial forces of the undeveloped countries is just like supportingthe
ultranationalists of the West, and is not the way to achieve peace and human
rights in the world.

Cultural relativism fails to understand the new
reality because it still views the world in the framework of the socialist
movement of the past, albeit a social-democratic version of it, and it
patronizes the undeveloped countries, by not taking the progressive views coming
out of countries like Iran seriously, when such views clearly contradict the
ideology of the anti-war movement, that completely ignores the import of Dark
Forces of Medievalism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The progressive forces of the West are the
natural allies of pro-democracy movement of Iran, if they separate the Medieval reaction to globalization, from the
genuine attempts to democratize the globalization worldwide. The Western
anti-war movement needs its own heretics, to come to grips with and help the
progress of newly forming
human civilizations.